June is Bustin’ Out All Over

With all the sun we have been having recently, and a good bit of watering, some of the buds I wrote about earlier have turned into flowers, and a few plants that didn’t have any have produced flowers anyway.

The most exciting is on the strawberry plants, an attractive pink flower that has a large lump in it, which I hope is a strawberry in the making. For the eagle-eyed among you, it can just be made out in the bottom left corner of the flower.

Strawberry bloom

While we are in hanging basket mode, the tumbling tom, which had a couple of sad-looking flowers when I got it, is now producing a lot more.

Tumbling tom petals

Meanwhile, one of the sunflowers looks just on the edge of going into full flower, with the sepals wide open. (Thanks to G for the real word, which was much better than my original try of ‘leafy bit behind the flower’). It is actually doing a rather good impression of a giant thistle.

Sunflower Sepals

The surprise members of the group were the peas, which showed no signs of doing anything yesterday, but today  had a number of flowers on them. Not the best picture but they were all facing the wrong way for me to get a good picture.

Bonus pea flower

A couple of the older residents in the garden are obviously having none of these young upstarts stealing all their thunder, so the climbing rose has finally started to bloom aswell.

Oldy, but a goody

 

Hey Buddy!

It looks like lots of things are starting to happen about the garden with various plants starting reach up and produce buds. My beans are wrapping their way around the cane wigwam I built them.

Borlotti boa constrictor

Meanwhile the courgettes are producing what look like lots of flower buds around the base of the stem, which will hopefully turn into loads of lovely veg, which is exciting as although they are still a way off, I believe courgettes can appear almost overnight.

Courgettes in the making

Finally we have the strawberry plants which have little red buds forming under the leaves, but I can’t find any info if these are where the strawbs will grow from, if runners will sprout from here or something else altogether. I guess I will have to wait and see.

Mystery bud

 

Hanging Gardens of Suburbia

I have made what should be the final additions to the UTC garden. We have a couple of hanging basket hooks attached to the back of the house that we have never really used, and as I have probably taken up enough ground space, they are prime candidates for a bit of vertical farming (as Brass Eye would call it).

In order to use some of the packing straw that came with my veg I have filled one with a couple of strawberry plants, a trailing type called Roman that is meant to be suitable for baskets and produce an apple blossom pink flower and deep red fruit.

Just the right height to hit my head on!

The other basket is for yet more toms, in this case Tumbling Tom Reds, for which there is an informative post on this growing from seed blog. Again a variety best suited to baskets. Hopefully they will provide lots of fruit, in which case if the peppers go well it will be panzanella ahoy!

Not yet tumbling toms

So this time that really is it, all the plants I am going to grow this year, as any more and we won’t be able to fit in the garden.